Things are heating up in Eastern European Startup Scene

… but not in the Northern Germany, where we are adopting English attitude to the weather conditions, “… they called it a disaster, we call it summer”, as one Facebook shareable suggested.

Deal flow

3D Property visualization startup Real5D created by the Hungarian Farago brothers has received $1.2 million dollars in Series-A funding. Actually, they closed the funding in 10 days, which is faster than getting the funding announcement published on TechCrunch.

Russian RealSpeaker Lab received a grant of about $150,000 from government-owned innovation center Skolkovo. The company claims to be able to improve quality of speech recognition by 40 percent by focusing not only on audio recognition, but also on the video of the speaker, not very frequent occurence, however. For those of us who record interviews on an audio recorder, let’s not get too excited, it will still take regular hours to process.

Launches and announcements

Slovak aggregated online paywall Piano Media launched in Poland. Seven Polish media companies which own 27 national and regional newspapers, 14 magazines and Poland’s national public radio will share Piano paywall.

We’ve been told about a California-based accelerator with Bulgarian roots called VoiVoda Labs, which is run by Val Babajov (the background in software and mobile development outsourcing). The company focuses on B2B businesses, and helps syndicate investments between $250,000 and $1 million. We shall watch with interest, if freshly launched Bulgarian startup ecosystem will cooperate with its Bulgarian expats to take their ventures westwards.

Founder Institute is looking to set up an accelerator location in Croatia, which is one of the few Eastern European countries lacking its own accelerator program, and which is expecting Geeks on a Plane to attend. Croatians have been enthusiastically sharing the news in social networks. I do however want to remind them, that Founder Institute functions as an MBA program, where founders have to pay to get in.

More on startup accelerators: Czech Startup Yard invites the investors to attend its demo day on the 7th of August.

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Natasha Starkell

TwitterLinkedInFacebook Google+ Natasha Starkell is the founder and CEO of GoalEurope, advisory firm focusing on technology investment and software development in Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to starting GoalEurope she has worked in the field of finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy and offshore outsourcing at Unisys Corporation in Switzerland and United Kingdom. She has an MBA degree from London Business School. She speaks Russian, English and German. She lives in Northern Germany.